Biography of Spirtual Co-Author Pearl Curran Part 1

About the automatic writer Pearl Curran who produced a large amount of poetry and books through the help of the spirit world.

PEOPLE WITH STRANGE POWERS

She Wrote Best-sellers Dictated by a Spirit

It would be difficult to imagine a more inauspicious beginning. On the evening of June 22, 1913, two women sat hunched over a Ouija board in the living room of a middle-class home situated in a quiet St. Louis, Mo., residential district. The house belonged to Pearl Curran (1883-1937), and with Pearl was her close friend Emily Hutchings. As messages were spelled out by the Ouija pointer racing back and forth across the board, the ladies were first entertained and then intrigued by a spirit which introduced itself as "p-a-t-c, p-a-t-c." The spirit seemed to concern itself with Mrs. Curran's grief over the loss of her beloved father, who had died two months earlier.

Mrs. Curran and Mrs. Hutchings were back in touch with the spirit in July and continued to communicate with it not only through the remaining months of 1913 but during the years following. For nearly a quarter of a century, the spirit spoke to and through Pearl Curran, only to be stilled finally by Mrs. Curran's death in 1937.

In the initial months, a partnership developed between Mrs. Curran and the spirit. Others--including Mrs. Hutchings on many occasions--sat around the Ouija board with Mrs. Curran, but it was to her that the ethereal messages were primarily and consistently directed.

On Mar. 13, 1919, Pearl Curran became the sole agent of transmission, first through her mental visualization of letters and then of entire words, and finally through automatic writing.

That partnership was prolifically creative. The spirit characterized itself as a singer of wisdom, and through the years it produced thousands of aphorisms, epigrams, maxims, and poems.

The poetry was widely accepted during the early years of the partnership. In 1918 Curran and the spirit--by then identified as "Patience Worth"--were honored by an invitation to the annual reception at the New York City--based National Arts Club, which exhibited the most highly regarded literature of the year. The spirit declined the invitation. However, examples of the collaborative poetry were published in the 1918 edition of Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse, along with the poems of Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and Edgar Lee Masters. Of the Worth-Curran poems, Edgar Lee Masters stated, "I am not prepared to give an opinion whether [Mrs. Curran's] stuff comes from Patience Worth or not. There is no doubt, however, that she is producing remarkable literature."

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